Why UDDI Is Important

Web Services are a great advance in our quest for the Service
Oriented Enterprise, but most enterprises overlook the importance of a
Service Registry (UDDI). This article outlines reasons why UDDI is
critical to successful SOA initiatives and reviews recent enhancements
to the UDDI standard.

What is a Service Registry?

A service registry is a central repository that allows for the
cataloging of services throughout the enterprise. This catalog
provides service consumers a place to search for details about service
providers, the functional areas (taxonomies) these services address and
binding details (location, contract, transport, etc.) for services.

The analogy often used is that of the telephone directory, but I
think DNS (Domain Name System) is also a good fit. DNS is something we
all understand at least at some level. DNS helps us as humans find
computers which only know each other as IP Addresses (numbers). There
is a similar parallel with a service registry. Service registries help
us as service consumers (people) find services in a simple and
centralized manner. They go one step further, however, and help
consumers (programs) know how specifically to communicate with them as
well.

UDDI

Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is the
accepted standard for service registries in the SOA context. It is
now in its third version and has added important features that really
make it the only practical choice for service registry. There are many
UDDI servers (i.e. products) available; every large software vendor
produces one. There are also many open source servers available as
well. The good news is that they mostly implement the entire
specification; even the free ones.

Continuing the telephone directory analogy, UDDI consists of three types of directories: